


Three Minutes to Midnight

by MarkoftheAsphodel



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Thracia 776
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Gen, Implied Finn/Brigid, More Watchmen than MCU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-29
Updated: 2018-11-29
Packaged: 2019-09-02 02:26:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16777807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarkoftheAsphodel/pseuds/MarkoftheAsphodel
Summary: Yesterday's heroes are today's vigilantes and peace exists in the shadows of nuclear annihilation. Eyvel and Finn clean up the streets in a city where almost everything the century promised has gone sour. Almost.





	Three Minutes to Midnight

**Author's Note:**

> I don't entirely remember why I started writing a Watchmen-themed FE5 AU (the pirate connection?) but it took about a year to finish. Enjoy?

He goes to the newsstand as he does every morning to buy the daily. The vendor knows him on sight now.

“I’ve got the new issue of the comic your boy likes,” says the vendor, and so Finn buys that as well. 

He doesn’t give the latest issue of _Shanty Pete and the Haunted Pirates_ to Leif on coming home; Finn leaves it out on the kitchen table that evening, once Leif and the girls have gone to bed. Should Leif wake in the night and find both his ‘parents’ not present, the comics might— might— be enough of a distraction and apology.

-x-

The neon hands of the clock that looms over their end of the city point skyward; it’s almost midnight, and beneath this starless sky the hands of that old clock count out every sorrowful hour. The clock and its tower are a relic of an earlier day, an age when steel-cored buildings soared skyward with optimism and neon tubes promised a brighter future. The original Crusaders belonged to that era, sleek and bright and promising an end to darkness.

Now neon has been relegated to tatty bars like the Rum Runner with its pirate-themed drinks, Crusaders have been relegated to a sordid chapter in history, and the only bright ray in the darkness is Eyvel. Her orange costume isn’t meant to blend into the shadows. The low-level garbage they track down are _supposed_ to see her coming, a burst of neon in the ever-present gloom. They aren’t necessarily supposed to see Finn in his monochrome palette of blues.

Blue complements orange on the color wheel, making it more exciting and vibrant. In the context of what they’re doing, excitement translates into…

 _Terror._

The terror that flashes across their target’s face when he sees Eyvel brings about the only excitement Finn can feel anymore. It takes one strike for Finn to send the target to the ground with two shattered knees. A second swipe of his lance sends the knife spinning away from Jacoby’s fingers. And then Eyvel’s upon him, the tip of her sword hovering over Jacoby’s stricken face. 

“Jacoby.” She says his name like a schoolteacher confronting a rascally child. 

“G-gold Goddess…”

Finn, now serving as lookout and witness, thinks of Jaco _ban_ , of a brawl fifteen years before against a thug with an electric sword. He’d kept the sword as a keepsake, for that had been a battle. This is… clean-up, and nothing more.

He ties up Jacoby while Eyvel rifles through the place, leaving all the evidence of Jacoby’s thieving and cons out for the police to find when they turn up.

“How come you ain’t wearing a mask?” Jacoby whines as Finn binds his wrists. “I thought all you freaks wore masks.”

“I don’t care if you see my face because I don’t care if you tell them I’m not dead.”

“Who’s they?” Jacoby asks, and when he doesn’t get a reply he repeats his question as a moan. “Who’s _they_?" 

Finn doesn’t answer. He’s the one who makes the anonymous call to the police to come and collect this particular piece of trash. Jacoby’s lucky to end up in police custody; he has other, even less kind, enemies they might have set upon him.

“Fine,” says Jacoby. “I’ll tell them some cut-rate knockoff of the Luminous Lancer busted both of my legs.”

“Yes, Jacoby,” says Eyvel, sounding almost as tender as a mother to this wayward child of the city. “That’s what you’ll tell them.”

-x-

There’s a television shop on the corner behind the now-dark newsstand. It’s begun to play news broadcasts all through the night, a novelty of propaganda. At two in the morning, one can stand by the glass and see the anchors move their lips through stories of how President Velthomer has achieved another miracle of peace.

“This peace was built on a foundation of lies and murder,” Finn says. Something in him is stinging from Jacoby’s demand to know _they_.

Eyvel shakes her head. She is apolitical, at least as much as a vigilante whose vigilantism is technically outlawed can be above politics. Whatever President Velthomer does at home and abroad matters less to her than the small circle of n’er do wells she can personally kick to the ground and terrify with her blade.

Terrifying someone like Jacoby brings a flush of color to her face. 

There is nothing Finn can do about the television screen and its lies, and so they walk home, strip off their costumes, and steal a few hours’ sleep before it’s time to send the kids off to school.

Leif’s taken the Shanty Pete comic. Finn sees the bare space on the kitchen table and smiles. Evil is mundane, even predictable, but sometimes the small sweet things in life are predictable too. He’ll have to thank the news vendor in the morning.

-x-

Their next mission, six nights later, involves something more grave than mere grift and con artistry.

“Don’t feel obliged to go out of your way to keep him alive,” says Eyvel. These are not her normal instructions, but they’re not usually going after child traffickers.

Gryce has two large dogs, but Gryce isn’t home to hear them bark. Treats laced with a sedative take care of the dogs. They slip into Gryce’s place and wait. The target comes home a little before eleven that night. The target remarks on the silence of his dogs. The target opens a can of beer and sits down in front of the television.

The target knows he’s walked into an ambush.

“You two kids brought knives to a gunfight,” says Gryce. The handgun aimed at Finn is a model that isn’t legal anymore, but that’ll be the least of Gryce’s problems.

Finn feels nothing at all. He sees the flash of the gun, hears the sound of the bullet striking the wall to his right, then the sound of his lance-head as it crashes through Gryce’s ribcage. He sees the terror that twists Gryce’s face in the moment that Gryce realizes that some people do indeed get to bring melee weapons into gunfights and walk away. There should be more to this moment than there is.

“You’re an actual Crusader,” Eyvel says as she dumps the drawerfuls of hideous evidence around Gryce’s corpse. There’s something shaking in her voice that isn’t the almost-carnal thrill she usually gets from taking someone down. It’s not something he’s heard before.

“Hardly worthy of the name,” says Finn as he cleans off his weapon.

“You manipulated space-time to deflect a bullet.” 

“I didn’t. Something else did that for me.” Finn knows that’s not a particularly convincing story. “I don’t come from any of the Crusader bloodlines.”

“Then where’d you get powers from?”

“I prayed,” he says, as there’s no other explanation. “I prayed that I would have the strength to carry on, given everyone else was gone. And then… miracles happened.”

“I thought all the Crusaders derived their powers from experiments during the Great War,” Eyvel says now. “Radiation and strange things down at the atomic level… not _praying_.”

“The Crusaders I met didn’t know where their powers came from and most didn’t have full control over their powers,” he replies. “I don’t have any control over whatever it is that keeps me alive when I probably shouldn’t be. It just… is.” 

“Sometimes we simply _are_ ,” says Eyvel, and in the middle of this house of horrors, she gives him a sad, sweet smile over Gryce’s bloodied corpse. “And we do what we must.”

-x-

The Gold Goddess and her nameless companion walk down the littered street past the newsstand and the flickering lights of the Rum Runner. In the television shop, every screen shows the face of President Velthomer, who must have done something marvelous again.

“All the sins of his age are engraved upon his face,” says Finn, for he remembers a long-ago encounter with the Red Flame of Justice, in those happy days before the fall, when true Crusaders ruled the nights. Instead of concealing the Red Flame’s beauty, the domino mask left him looking like a prince at a masquerade ball.

“He’s suffered, hasn’t he?” Eyvel says. “There can’t be anything worse than losing your child… and the love of your life.”

Finn thinks of Jacoban’s electric sword and how he left it with _her_. He wonders if there’s a half-grown child somewhere, half Crusader and half ordinary, playing with a sword that shoots arcs of pale fire, a marvelous toy that isn’t a toy at all. Perhaps one day they’ll meet on these streets.

For now, he walks home in Eyvel’s footsteps, a blue shadow to her divine golden light, back to the home where three children sleep in the false safety of President Velthomer’s world, a world that’s outlawed their very bodies and bloodlines for the betterment of all. The neon hands of the old clock tower stand at three minutes to midnight.

Each day they survive might only take them closer to the second the doomsday clock finally strikes the apocalypse. Finn may well come to regret that one of those deflected bullets never landed. But for now, he _is_ , and so he does what he must, in hope of tomorrow.

-x-

He goes to the newsstand as he does every morning.

“That comic your boy likes has come in already,” says the vendor, offering a broad smile to a steady customer. 

As he hands over a few coins for his paper and the comic book, Finn feels a great import in this small transaction, one of the atomic building-blocks of the society around them. In the softness of a pale dawn the geometry of the old clock tower is beautiful, the clock proud, the sweep of its hands through the decades reassuring instead of menacing.

“Thank you for carrying _Shanty Pete_ ,” Finn says. “My son looks forward so much to these every week.”

In that moment he can almost feel the threads of truth pulled through the warp of fiction, just the way that space and time itself distort around him in fractions of seconds beyond his control.

They _are_ — Finn and Leif, Eyvel and the girls, the news vendor and the clock tower, the pixels in the television screens and the neon atoms vibrating in glass tubes and the dots of ink on the newsprint between his fingers. Every facet of their existence in the vast whirl of Creation is astonishing.

It isn’t a good feeling— it reminds him that “terrific” and “terrible” stem from the same root. But in that moment, it’s enough of a feeling, enough of a _something_ to matter.

**Author's Note:**

> Somewhere in not!New York City, Patty is using an electric sword to shake people down. Good for her.
> 
> "Jacoby" is vaguely inspired by Jacobi aka Moloch the Mystic. I liked how his name evoked FE4's Jacoban. As for Gryce, if you've read Watchmen you know what he did and we won't go into it here.
> 
> Arvis is this is sort of a cross between the Eternal President Nixon of Watchmen and a successful Ozymandias. Nothing ever ends, after all, and the truth will eventually out in some fashion...


End file.
